


Sometime Past Midnight

by ElwritesFanworks



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Childhood Trauma, Cigars, Clinging, Crying, Cynicism, Daddy Issues, Drabble, Emotional Baggage, Finger Sucking, M/M, Masochism, One Shot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Self-Destruction, Smoking, Subspace, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-24 21:04:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12020970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElwritesFanworks/pseuds/ElwritesFanworks
Summary: A motel room. Old wounds. Coping unconventionally.





	Sometime Past Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by an old cm kink meme prompt for finger sucking. Unrelated to my other cm fic stuff.

* * *

There’s something to be said for self-care. Not the cookie-cutter ‘blankets and a bath bomb’ combination that would have grown men coloring pictures of butterflies and flowers while drinking herbal tea, but a tailor-made, individual regimen, designed to keep you going in the face of danger, like battlefield medicine. Pick you up, patch you up, put you back in the field. Enough pain to hurt but not injure, enough self-destruction to appease the demons, enough safety valves to get the rage out without killing yourself in the process. Rinse and repeat – catharsis for the price of a cigar and a few fingers of scotch.

Admittedly, Rossi’s been told to lay off both the scotch and the cigars. His GP falls into the category of people who think that ‘good coping behaviour’ is automatically synonymous with sharing one’s feelings. She’s just like his wives, in that respect, well-meaning, but only able to ask to shoulder the weight because she has no idea how much doing so would crush her – crush the hope out of her.

Hotch, though, understands, and maybe that’s why they started drinking together. Or sleeping together. Or doing… this.

See, Rossi’s a simple man, for all his expensive tastes. He can be happy with his conventional vices, put his feet up and call it a night. Aaron… Aaron’s the picture of conventionality in every respect _but_ this – maybe because it’s the one, trusted place where he doesn’t have an audience of people who expect him to carry the world on his shoulders.

Rossi transfers his cigar from his hand to his lips, gripping it with his teeth so that he can be free to reach down and stroke Hotch’s hair, softly, parentally. He doesn’t go as far as to say paternally – doesn’t want to go digging through the tangled mess of thorns that lie behind that particular door. It’s enough to be a guardian of sorts, when he’s needed. Hotch would never come to anyone else for this.

That’s what makes it different from the drinking and the sex. It’s just… closeness. Just holding.

Hotch turns his face, presses his lips to Rossi’s knuckles, mouths at his fingers. Rossi lets him suck them in to the wet heat of his mouth and looks away. There’s secrets and ghosts in Hotch’s eyes tonight not meant for him to see. He just smokes and watches as the ceiling fan of the motel makes slow circles in the muggy night air. Another motel room. Another backwater town – the armpit of America. Rape, incest, murder. Same shit, different day. It says a lot – too much – about him that all he feels in response to it is tired and a little cranky. He can bust his balls every day to put bad guys in jail and still, some sick fuck will pop up out of nowhere and take the place of the last unsub. Rossi can’t see a world where that wouldn’t happen, where the endless cycle of violence would stop. You do your job, you fight the good fight, and it does fuck all to solve the problem. It keeps the water back, dams it up, but it doesn’t drain it away.

At least Rossi has the good sense to admit all this to himself, with some sort of smug fatalism that comes with knowing the odds and doing the right thing anyway. He’ll always have the moral high ground, always have the wins and the people he’s saved. At least he knows when to blame himself, and when not too. Hotch – he’s too self-critical. Rossi thinks, absurdly, of one of those sad, stressed birds in a too-small cage, plucking itself bald as its sanity disintegrates. Left to his own devices, Hotch would probably pick himself apart in the same way. He used to have Haley. Now… now he has whatever Rossi can build for him, in whatever random motel room they’re stuck in for the night. Rossi has a knack for that, he’s learned over time. He can make sanctuary out of anywhere – even a place with stained sheets and thin walls and the smell of dry rot.

If he had to pick a word for what’s happening to his fingers, he’d say Hotch is sucking them, sure, but less in the sense of foreplay and simulated fellatio and more in the sense of a baby nursing, or a little kid with his thumb in his mouth. Actually, the last comparison rings true. There’s something about the situation that reminds Rossi very much of the primitive childhood comforts social convention beats out of children – figuratively or, in some cases, literally.

He wonders if Hotch ever sucked his thumb as a boy, and if he was ever hit for it.

Hotch swallows until the fingers are at the back of his throat, and then just keeps them there, shaking and humming around them so softly Rossi’s sure he isn’t meant to notice, so he pretends he doesn’t. Doesn’t hear him slurp and sob and gag himself.

It’s not sexual, for Rossi at least. He’s a little hard because it feels good, sure, and years of cultural and biological conditioning to associate finger-sucking with sex don’t just disappear because Hotch has a quirk, but any frissons of heat are erased by a blanketing sense of weariness. It’s not sadness – he’s too old, has seen too much, to be saddened by something this… mundane, for lack of a better word (which, in itself, says too much) – and it’s certainly not pity. Aaron Hotchner is one of the most capable men he’s ever met. Stubborn, single-minded, and a certified workaholic, sure, but not weak. His psychiatric fragility in moments like this is a by-product of his being so strong.

Hotch pulls back. The fingers slide, wrinkled and wet, from his lips, and he buries his face in Rossi’s chest hair. He’s entirely non-verbal, just a collection of sounds and plaintive moaning. It would be unbearable, if Rossi didn’t know it helped him cope. Knowing that, it’s still terrifying.

Before Hotch – before _this thing_ with Hotch, Rossi considered himself well-informed where sex was concerned. Up until Hotch, BDSM was just another part of that. That someone could enter subspace without any sort of external stimuli, sexual or otherwise, seemed bizarre, but after one anxious night of frantic googling – the night after the first time it happened – it was the best explanation Rossi’d come up with.

Ever the profiler, he’d figured it out after a bad case – a really bad case. Hotch had looked at him and let the brokenness show in his eyes, just enough to make his needs known, and Rossi understood. What use was spanking, what use was a whip, to men like them? The pain of making a mistake in the field, of not catching an unsub before losing another victim – that made all the controlled bedroom stuff seem like child’s play. There was nothing that even came close.

Hotch sobs and suckles on his fingers in intermittent bursts, punctuated by long bouts of silence where he just presses as close as he can to Rossi’s side. It has to be at least an hour until he stops, because Rossi has finished his cigar. He's moving towards the ashtray when Hotch makes a strangled noise and speaks, his voice hoarse.

“Dave.”

Rossi hesitates, unsure of what Hotch is asking, until Hotch lowers his head, presenting his bare shoulder. They’d both lost their shirts hours ago, ‘round about when Hotch had sagged against him, pressing him back against the closed door and mouthing at his jaw, all teeth and whimpers and clutching hands. Rossi stared down at the pale skin and wondered if Hotch had planned this, or if he was just as surprised by the dark turn his impulses were taking.

 _“Please,”_ Hotch insisted, with a voice like a man on a knife’s edge.

It’s moments like this that Rossi questions his own judgement. Maybe bath bombs and herbal teas are the way to go after all. He can see himself doing it – bringing the cigar down, leaving a scar. He can smell the skin burning, knows Hotch wants it to hurt, and he almost gives in. Almost.

When he says no, Hotch breaks down, cusses him out, calls him a bastard. Breaks down. When he finally stops crying, Rossi strokes his hair, rocks him like a baby. Hotch shakes, a little embarrassed, a little scared. Mostly just worn out.

“Sorry,” he breathes. “I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to be.”

Rossi gathers him close. Like it or not, he’s Hotch’s particular brand of self-care. Fortunately, he can live with that.


End file.
